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Thursday, May 22, 2014

INTERVIEW: Jeff Robinson & Fresno Pride!

Information links and contact details are
available at the end of this article…

This year marks the 24th
year for the Fresno
Pride Parade & Festival . The theme this year is “Live & Love
Proudly”. Fresno Rainbow Pride, the largest LGBT event of the year, takes place
on Saturday, June 7th starting at 10am on Olive Avenue in the Tower
District. This is the largest Pride event in the Central Valley and the only
one that includes a parade. The event draws approximate 3-5,000 people each
year.

The parade starts at 10am and runs
east bound on Olive Avenue from Palm Avenue to Maroa. There are expected to be
about 50 parade entries this year. It’s not too late to participate in the
parade, simply visit www.fresnorainbowpride.com
or call 559-486-3464. There is a fee for a parade entry, and it goes up as the
date gets closer, so get your request in today.

There are awards for parade entries
that include Largest Contingent, Most Festive, Best Float and CEO Award.

Immediately following the Pride Parade
is the Pride Festival, a street festival at Fulton and Alhambra. You enter the
festival off of Olive Avenue and the entry fee remains at a low $5. Entry to
the festival includes a wide variety of vendors and organizations, everything
from nonprofits to retail vendors. As always, this is a very family friendly
event. The Fresno County Department of Public Health will also be on hand with
free HIV testing.

Your entry to the festival also
includes a wide variety of entertainment including the Unison Dance Tent with
various local DJ’s and GoGo dancers. On the main entertainment stage you can
see acts from Fresno and around the state. This year the main entertainment
stage will have four local hosts…Leilani Price, Patricia DeLeon, Justin Cider
and Victoria De La Manana. Live singers, band and drag performers make up the
performances this year and include the Raging Grannies, Damon Pardo of Rocky
Horror, the Tiny Kites Band and live band Santa Mira. Local drag performers
include Charm Alina, Cookie Cutter, Hazzard Strange, Cara Coronado, Emma Berry,
Leilani Price, Patricia DeLeon, Giselle O’Ell, A Town, Justin Cider, Andy
Rogenous and Alec Alright.

Community Link operates the Pride
Parade and Festival, and is an official 501c3 nonprofit organization. Given
that, they are always in need of financial donations before, during and after
the event. All fees charged for the parade and festival, as well as program
advertising, go toward the cost of the event. You can also donate independently
by mailing a donation to Community Link, PO Box 4959, Fresno, CA 93744.

On the day of the event funds are
raised through the Beer & Wine Garden as well as the drink station run by
Community Link inside the festival and a dessert booth run by the youth group.
During the parade, the youth group will march the big rainbow flag down the
street and you can toss in coins and dollars to donate to the cause. Remember
that you can also drop a donation off directly at any of the Community Link
booths during the festival. This event needs community support to stay strong!

I sat down to talk to Jeff Robinson, who runs
Community Link, to talk about this year’s Pride Parade, as well as Pride in
general…(above photo of Jeff Robinson and Juan Bustamante courtesy Rene Salas)

Chris Jarvis: Who are the Grand
Marshalls this year?

Jeff Robinson: We’re still waiting on
some responses so I can’t really talk about that yet.

CJ: I know the Festival is a family
friendly event, what can families expect this year?

JR: Wesley Methodist Church is running
a carnival for kids, with games and activities. We’ll have the bounce houses as
usual. We’ll be giving out goodie bags this year to the first 75 kids, with
juice boxes, water, snack and a toy. The entertainment tent is probably not a great
place for little kids to hang out, cause you never know what’s going to come
out of someone’s mouth.

CJ: What about any involvement from
the City Hall or the Mayor regarding Pride this year?

JR: We’re working to get a response
from the Mayor’s office. We’ll see what happens. We’ll probably get a letter,
but it’ll be watered down, like in the past.

CJ: Does it mention the LGBT community
or Pride?

JR: No, it will probably say what it’s
said before, which is “we welcome you here on your special day”. No words like
lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender. No Stonewall, none of that. We’ve put
out that our community needs to hear these words, not just that it’s our “special
day”.

CJ: You would think, given what’s
happened in Porterville, that they’d be a little more sensitive to it.

JR: You would think, but we’ll see. We’ll
probably get a proclamation from the City Council. Last year 3-4 of them signed
it, but we don’t get one from the entire council.

CJ: How do people sign up to
volunteer?

JR: Go to our website at www.fresnorainbowpride.com and
click on Rainbow Pride. Our last meeting before Pride will be on the 6th
to show people where everything is at, the flagpole, the entertainment, the
tables, the trash, etc. We’ll walk them to those areas so they have a better
idea of where everything is at.

CJ: What’s your biggest need as far as
volunteers?

JR: Our main need is for people to be
at the Parade and be safety monitors. It’s very simple. They’re going to get a
t-shirt, free entrance to the festival and a front row seat at the parade. We
work with the police department in that we guarantee them a certain amount of
volunteers that are going to come and close off the minor residential streets.
So there will be caution tape up and then the volunteers get to stand there and
watch the parade while telling people to remember to stay on the sidewalk, stay
out of the streets and so on. We need a minimum of 23 of those volunteers. We
like to double up so we have two people per corner, so if people want to go out
and do this with a friend, that’s perfect. The second need is help during the
festival, like directing people where they need to go, helping people, working
in one of our booths, helping us get the recycling and trash taken care of,
etc.

CJ: I still hear from time to time, “Why
do we need a Pride Parade?”. Can you talk about why Pride is important, and
why, as we get more and more legal rights around the nation, that it’s still
important?

JR: Although we’re getting equality
across the nation it doesn’t mean that we aren’t still going to face people
that don’t want us to have those rights. So we need to make sure that although
it’s on the books, we need to make people see that there are a large amount of
people that this effects. It affects us as LGBT folks, as well as our family
and friends. The second important part
of Pride is to recharge our collaborative batteries. Every day we go out and we
face a wide variety of things. Questions about who we are and our
relationships. So although we’re moving ahead, there’s till those things that
affect us greatly that sometimes we can’t put our finger on, where we’re still
made to feel that we’re not “as good as”. So it’s great to be able to come together
with a group of people for a common cause to celebrate all of our momentum and
where we’re headed. Recharging ourselves is important to continue that effort
and that struggle to get where we need to be. That’s why we need Pride.

CJ: Agreed. I often tell people who
say that the goal of LGBT people is to integrate so much into society that we
don’t need special places or celebrations, that they obviously aren’t paying
attention to other cultures in America. So many of them that not only continue
to enshrine those special places and celebrations, but are expanding on them. When
I hear gay people say they hope for the day when we don’t need to gather
together or have special celebrations, I find that hard to put my head around. Why
are we trying to disappear into the mix?

JR: Exactly. If you’re German American
or Polish American and you’re back east, there are huge celebrations and
parades for them. Every Sunday is Christian day. Every Easter and every
Christmas is Christian day. So I think it’s still important to have those
events. It’s important to have Cinco de Mayo events, Juneteenth, Harvey Milk
Day, Martin Luther King day…it’s important to have those days to call back to
why we’re here. We have things that we need to celebrate and remember. We need
to remember people that didn’t have such happy endings.

CJ: And you and I have talked before
about our culture vanishing in so many ways. Talk about that.

JR: I really worry about losing our
culture, and that young kids don’t grasp or understand those people that came
before them and did the tremendous, hard work. To see an out, gay person in
years past was a tremendous act of bravery. Look at history, there was a
vibrant gay movement here and in Europe before World War II. These people lost
their property and their lives.

CJ: What I hear all the time from
young people is “oh, that was before I was born.” Really? I don’t remember
hearing that from young people when I was in school. You were expected to know
about history.

JR: That’s why at the end of my youth
groups we talk about news and I tell them what’s happened in the community.

CJ: It seems as we gather more legal
equality, we’re losing ourselves inside of it. I don’t understand when gay people
say that when we get to a certain point, equality wise, we don’t need to such a
presence.

JR: Here’s the deal, we’ve always been
much stronger when we face resistance. When Wilson vetoed AB
101and everybody said, oh just be
quiet and act like you’re just like everyone else, we have 2.5 kids and a dog
and a white picket fence…BS…we had to take to the streets. The teachers came
out of the classrooms and the queers came out of the bars and took over Los
Angeles and San Francisco. We said what the hell, you promised us a gay rights
bill, even as watered down as it was going to be. In the AIDS epidemic, we got nothing
by working within the channels. We had to agitate, making people look, making people
address the issues. So that whole “We’re going to get our rights” doesn’t work.
So we’ve gotten rid of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. Great. What about all the National
Guards? What about all the Guards that aren’t allowing their troops to marry?
So we got our rights and we didn’t get our rights. So it’s easy to tear the
stuff up over the big things, but we all face a whole bunch of little things
day by day, and that gets to you.

CJ: I was talking to my brother once
about how much we have to fight for every bit of equality and he said to me, do
you really think that once you’ve got equality, that people are automatically
going to like you? I said no, of course not. But that’s what he thought, that
we’re fighting to be liked. We’re not fighting to be liked, we’re fighting to
be equal. That’s why all this can’t go away. We can’t just stop being out and
present because someone signs a bill saying we can get married.

JR: We can get married in a whole bunch
of states now, but we can still be fired across the country just because
someone thinks we’re gay.

JR: Exactly. Particularly once they
said you can fight and die for your country. It should have been automatic
after that. And this whole bit they tried with leaving out our transgender
brothers and sisters was garbage. We should all be included.

Fundraisers have happened around Fresno for
the Pride Parade and Festival. Thank you to all the businesses that have helped
raise funds, including Tacos Marquitos, The North Tower Circle, Aldos and Club
Legends. Community Link also held “Bowling For Pride” in April to raise funds. At
press time, the next fundraisers are: HOUSE OF HIT on
Saturday, May 24th at 9pm at the North Tower Circle, then a joint Super Sized Mega Mixer
between The Fresno Men’s Mixer and POW (Professional OUT Women) which will take
place at Vini Vidi Vici on Friday June 6th at 5:30pm.

There are no
more food vendor licenses available for the festival. Other Festival
Applications and payments should be received before 11:59pm on June 1st, 2014. Some
applications may be accepted after the deadline, but fees will need to be paid
in cash and will depend on available space. Parade entries will be accepted up
to the start of the parade (cash only on the day of the event).